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Abstract
The Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet has always been an inspiration for the modern adapters. His story has proved its adaptability not only for the stage of theatre, but also for the cinema screen. The examples chosen for this paper are Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann in 1996, West Side Story by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins in 1961 and Shakespeare in Love, an American - British film made by John Madden in 1998.
Key words: adaptation, screen, representation, play
The story of Romeo and Juliet created by Shakespeare developed in the history of literature a myth that influenced writers all over the world. This aspect was emphasized in the literature critique as a "romantic cult"[1] that became a source of inspiration for modern adaptations or representations. In this analysis, we are going to focus on screen transpositions of the Shakespearean play. We are going to sketch an analysis of the film Romeo + Juliet by Baz Luhrmann, a film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
One of the most faithful adaptations to the work of Shakespeare is without any doubt Romeo + Juliet of the director Baz Luhrmann. The film remains faithful to the writing of William Shakespeare, although the two lovers are transported to the contemporary period. In this case we cannot talk about an intercultural adaptation, as this version just brings to the contemporary stage a popular story from the west, as W. B. Worthen comments in his book Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance: "Although the dynamics of global/intercultural/postcolonial Shakespeare are given specific - and different - force in any individual production, Baz Luhrman's 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet brings these issues into a particularly useful focus. The film is not, let me be clear, "intercultural" in any significant sense. It does not produce Shakespeare through a performance practice "foreign" to Western theatre [...]; it uses the world's dominant mode of entertainment production - the Hollywood film - to stage one of the West's most familiar dramas." [2] This is an American movie that transports Verona in the neighborhoods of New York by keeping a contemporary decor of the xxth century. This film has the particularity of having kept the dialogs of the Shakespearean...